City News Service - Tenants' rights advocates today called on the Los Angeles City Council to amend the city's proposed tenant harassment ordinance to include stronger enforcement measures.

The City Council's Housing Committee is scheduled to review the draft ordinance on Wednesday, according to the city clerk.

``We are urging the council members to take a serious look at this situation and to go ahead and pass the anti-harassment ordinance,'' an advocate said at the rally organized by the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. ”This is a very serious matter. The more you ignore it, the bigger it gets.''

San Jose Mercury News - About two dozen Fruitvale tenants are suing their landlord, demanding he fix living conditions they say range from rat infestations to holes in the floor to an ongoing lack of hot water.

The six-unit building on 28th Avenue is rife with health and safety issues that violate state and local law, according to lawyers who filed the lawsuit this week in Alameda County Superior Court. They claim landlord Michael You, who owns the complex through BYLD 2 LLC, has neglected the building since taking ownership in 2018 — despite repeated requests by tenants to make repairs.

“He has willingly violated these laws and allowed atrocious conditions to exist in this property,” said Ruby Acevedo, a lawyer with Public Advocates who is representing the plaintiffs.

NBC San Diego - Patricia Mendoza’s fight to keep her home has been anything but easy.

"It's been a nightmare, but what's really helped me is learning my rights, to know that I'm not alone,” said Mendoza, an Imperial Beach single mother of two.

Mendoza lost her job in medical transportation last March, and while her landlord wanted her out of her home due to her inability to pay rent, she’s been able to resist two eviction orders.

KPBS - The city and county of San Diego set aside more than $47 million in federal coronavirus aid last fall to pay landlords whose low-income tenants were behind on rent.

But some eligible renters didn’t get any help because their landlords didn’t take the money and they weren’t required to explain why.

Spectrum News 1 - It’s been a long time since Adela Peñabla has gotten a good night’s sleep. "My body starts to shake and I have depression,” she said. 

An immigrant from El Salvador, Peñabla moved to Southern California 18 years ago, making a living as a street vendor. She’s been renting a tiny room in house in South L.A., where she cooks her meals in a make shift kitchen, using bottled water in lieu of a sink.

She’s been able to make just enough to cover her $370 a month rent, until the pandemic hit and her income dried up overnight.

Mothers are being evicted far more frequently than other Americans. This is the hidden story of America's looming housing crisis.

The New Republic - In February, a white man showed up at Patricia Mendoza’s door and informed her that the month-to-month lease for her two-bedroom apartment in Imperial Beach, California, would be terminated on April 10. He was speaking so loudly that her daughter began recording him on her phone; inside, Mendoza’s son began to cry. They had been through two eviction attempts since the pandemic began last March. Now, they would have to fend off another.

Before the pandemic, Mendoza told me, she would have said the worst thing that had ever happened to her was her divorce. “It was a dark time in my life,” she said, but “nothing compared to what my struggle is now.”

La Opinion - Las redes sociales mostraron imágenes de inquilinos que salían con sus pocas pertenencias en bolsas de plástico de una propiedad en el sur de Los Ángeles el jueves por la mañana.

Aproximadamente 12 inquilinos de una casa de huéspedes, localizada sobre la calle 46 y la esquina McKinley en el sur de Los Ángeles, desconocían que la renta que estaban pagando no iba directa a los dueños de la propiedad, sino a un inquilino principal que desapareció.

La casa de huéspedes usualmente albergaba a personas que eran mayores de edad o personas en recuperación de adicciones. No era parte de ningún programa gubernamental. Los vecinos dicen que el inquilino principal rentaba por su cuenta y los interesados se enteraban acerca de esta vivienda mediante amigos o conocidos.

NBC Bay Area - A new digital-first investigative series coming in late March 2021 to the NBC Bay Area app on Roku and Apple TV and to NBCBayArea.com

Against the backdrop of California’s affordability crisis, pushing thousands of Black residents out of their homes and onto the streets, a group of unhoused working mothers in Oakland took matters into their own hands.

In November 2019, the mothers formed a group called Moms 4 Housing and illegally occupied a vacant, corporate-owned home on Magnolia Street in West Oakland. Standing on the shoulders of generations of iconic Oakland activists, such as the Black Panthers and Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the moms’ act of civil disobedience sparked a national reckoning around displacement and the erosion of African American neighborhoods.

“The Moms of Magnolia Street” follows the moms’ journeys as they took on the large home-flipping corporation and challenged the city’s power structure.

Participants want access to vaccines for school staff and all zip codes serviced by district to be out of purple tier

LA Daily News - Students, parents, educators and community members rallied in downtown Los Angeles on Saturday, Feb. 20, to demand that schools not reopen amid the pandemic until stronger safety measures are in place. The event featured a mid-morning car caravan rally that began outside the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and ended at the Ronald Reagan State Building.

KQED - More renters in Richmond may soon be protected from evictions after the City Council on Tuesday approved directing city staff to draft stronger eviction protections for tenants during the pandemic.

"We feel the urgency of now, that we have to take action. So what we want to do is fill the gaps. This is the best scenario that we can do and we want to do the best scenario," said Richmond City Council member Gayle McLaughlin, who introduced the item.

Despite statewide protections that prevent tenants from eviction for nonpayment of rent if they claim a financial hardship, evictions are still happening, including in the city of Richmond. Contra Costa County evicted 135 people between the beginning of the pandemic and the end of 2020, the second-highest number of evictions across the Bay Area. That’s according to a KQED analysis of sheriff lockouts that was cited in the council member’s report.

Despite that moratorium, some landlords are looking for ways around the law to try to force tenants out now.

ABC 10 - A single mother of two young children has vowed that she will have to be "dragged out" of her home, after receiving notice by her landlord she's being forced out of her rental unit in Imperial Beach. This threat to evict Patricia Mendoza comes despite the current statewide eviction moratorium, which has now been extended through June.

CBS 8 - On the heels of announcing federal rental assistance in late January, Mayor Todd Gloria announced Friday the state will provide $45.5 million in assistance for San Diego residents unable to pay rent due to the impacts of COVID-19.

LA Times - Millions of Americans unable to pay their rent during the pandemic face a snowballing financial burden that threatens to deplete their savings, ruin their credit and drive them from their homes.

A patchwork of government action is protecting many of the most financially strapped tenants for now. But it could take these renters — especially low-income ones — years to recover, even as the rest of the economy begins to rebound.

Jacobin - Carroll Fife is a community organizer based in Oakland, California. She recently came to prominence for her role in helping to organize the Moms 4 Housing movement at the end of 2019, before going on to win a city council seat this past November. She won in the council district of West Oakland, the historic center of the Black Panthers that had, in more recent years, been controlled by a neoliberal representative. She still holds her position as the director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), and is looking to take her grassroots movement-building experience to city hall to achieve real material change for the working class.

Fife ran on a platform of the right to housing, defunding the police to fund public services, and implementing the Black New Deal — a local variant on the Green New Deal that takes anti-racism as a key focus. As she prepares to enter city hall, Fife sat down with Jacobin to discuss her background in organizing, the fight to build municipal power, and what it would look like to decommodify human essentials like housing.

The rent moratorium extension worked out in Sacramento is a flawed and incomplete emergency measure.

Capital & Main - Placed strictly in the context of the urgency that surrounds it, Monday’s announcement of a proposed extension of eviction protections for California’s battered lower income renters is welcome news. Moreover, since the deal was worked out among both state Senate and Assembly leaders, quick passage on Thursday is almost assured.

But a fix it is not. Rather, it’s exactly what it appears to be: a flawed and in many ways incomplete emergency measure, crafted in the high heat of the COVID-19 pandemic without the input of some significant stakeholders — and certain to require adjustments or perhaps follow-up legislation altogether.

Put another way, it is one piece of a very large puzzle. And when it comes to California’s ongoing crisis of affordable housing, that puzzle continues to grow.

CapRadio - Legislators are prepared to extend California’s eviction moratorium to the end of June while offering landlords an incentive to forgive back rent using an extra $2.6 billion the state received from the latest federal relief bill.

Legislators and groups representing landlords and tenants worked on a deal over the weekend, and the bill, SB 91, was introduced this morning, which means lawmakers can vote on it Thursday morning.  

“We have a deal,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said at a press conference, noting that the deal also extended to financial assistance for unpaid utilities.

...

“If federal tenant protection policies are mandatory because of the decades of evidence that landlords discriminate, such as fair housing, why would we allow landlords to opt out of a tenant protection program where the cost to society and human life could be catastrophic,” said Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment executive director Christina Livingston in a statement.

Spectrum News 1 -  Inside the eviction defense network offices in Westlake, siblings and attorneys Nathaly and Stefano Medina are working to keep hundreds of low-income Angelenos in their home.

They’ve had a fighters spirit since they were little, activists, a bit peleones, meaning agitators.

Truthout - Rent strikes have spread across the country with the spread of the coronavirus. In the pandemic’s first months, 400 New York City families stopped paying rent in buildings with over 1,500 rental units. In May, rent strikes involving 200,000 tenants spread to Philadelphia and elsewhere. Washington, D.C., in September saw tenant unions spring up in strikes at the Tivoli Gardens Apartments and the Woodner, as well as Southern Towers in nearby Alexandria.

Rent strikes had a history as a resistance tactic before the pandemic hit. Cleveland tenants settled a rent strike in February, after 38 families forced concessions on the landlord of the 348-unit Vue Apartments in Beachwood. San Francisco had a famous rent strike that went on for three years at the Midtown Park Apartments, ending in 2017.

Telemundo 52 - Inquilinos afectados por la pandemia aprovechan el miércoles por la noche el inicio de las tradicionales posadas para demandar a los miembros de la legislatura estatal que aprueben una extensión a la ley que los protege de ser desalojados. Gabriel Huerta reporta el 16 de diciembre de 2020.

CBS 8 - There are pleas from renters who said they could lose everything if the current eviction moratorium expires. Californians owe an estimated $1.7 billion in back rent and still find themselves unemployed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. State lawmakers are hoping to extend the moratorium while Gov. Gavin Newsom looks to the federal government for help.

San Francisco Examiner - 

California tenants struggling to pay rent due to COVID-19 would have until the end of 2021 to avoid eviction under a moratorium extension a Democratic lawmaker plans to introduce Monday.

At the end of August, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3088 into law, which requires tenants to pay at least 25% of their rent from Sept. 1 to Jan. 31, 2021 to avoid eviction. Tenants weren’t obligated to immediately back-fill payments missed from the start of the emergency in March through the summer, as long as they proved economic hardship, but landlords are entitled to eventually recoup all rent lost.

The law’s protections are scheduled to expire Feb. 1, and landlords can start collecting missed rent in civil court by March.

Post News Group - Treva Reid, District 7, and Carroll Fife, District 3, are the two new City Councilmembers elected in November pledging to use the power and resources of local government to help Oaklanders turn a corner on the multiple, intertwined poverty-fueled crises that impact the city.

Among the issues their top priorities for 2021 are rampant homelessness and housing insecurity for many thousands more.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 16, 2020

Media Contact: Rekha Radhakrishnan, 832-628-2312, [email protected]

Ralph Jean, 404-895-7004, [email protected], 

Sylvia Moore, 213-804-4679, [email protected] 

TENANTS DECLARE VICTORY AS LANDLORDS DENIED INJUNCTION IN CHALLENGE TO LOS ANGELES COVID-19 TENANT PROTECTIONS

Ordinances including 12-month repayment period and ban on eviction stemming from pandemic-related financial losses will remain in place

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA – On Friday, a federal judge announced a ruling denying a preliminary injunction for the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles, keeping crucial citywide ordinances in place to protect tenants during the COVID-19 pandemic. Tenants’ rights organizations the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action (ACCE Action) and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy (SAJE) joined the federal lawsuit Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles (AAGLA) v. City of Los Angeles in July to defend the City’s emergency eviction protections and rent freeze. AAGLA’s lawsuit seeks to void the City’s validly enacted eviction protection and rent freeze ordinances, thereby allowing its members to engage in mass evictions during the pandemic. Public Counsel, the Western Center on Law and Poverty, Public Interest Law Project, and Susman Godfrey LLP represent ACCE Action and SAJE.

Carroll Fife, known for helping homeless mothers take charge of a vacant California home, won a seat last week

The Guardian - Carroll Fife made headlines in the US last year as the radical architect behind Moms 4 Housing, a group of homeless mothers who bonded to commandeer a vacant home in Oakland, California, and put a face to the state’s housing and homelessness crisis.

Now, the vocal advocate for tenants’ rights is entering a new chapter in her activism. Fife won a seat on Oakland’s city council in last week’s election, beating a two-term incumbent. She will oversee an Oakland district that includes historically Black and underserved communities in West Oakland and more affluent areas with prime views of the San Francisco Bay.

Fife says she has no plans to change city government and “try to turn shit to sugar”; rather she plans to open the doors of city hall for other organizers to bring their demands to officials. The Guardian spoke to her about her ambitions for office, this year’s anti-police-brutality protests and her view on the presidential ticket.

BuzzFeed - The documents arrived paper-clipped and folded in Tiana McGuire’s mailbox in early September. She owed three months’ worth in rent, $3,050, it said on the packet of pages that her landlord, Sullivan Management Company (SMC), had shoved into her and her neighbors’ mailboxes in their apartment building in Oakland.

“Pay rent in 15 days or quit,” the first page read.

This was the notice McGuire had dreaded ever since she stopped paying rent in June. Even though she knew evictions had been suspended in Oakland since late March, the letter made it clear: She had two weeks to pay the rent she owed or she had to vacate her home of the last seven years.

KQED - Nearly a year after a group of homeless moms occupied a house in West Oakland and captured the nation's attention with their protest against the Bay Area's high housing costs, they came back to the home to celebrate.

On Oct. 9, Moms 4 Housing announced the home would soon become transitional housing for other homeless mothers, with services on-site to help with jobs, credit readiness and permanent housing.

"This is officially moms' house," said Dominique Walker, one of the moms who occupied the home.

KPIX 5 - Activists in San Francisco rallied outside the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Monday afternoon to demand that she and other Senate Democrats stop confirmation hearings for U.S. President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett.

The hearings, which kicked off Monday morning, could result in Barrett filling in the seat of late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who passed away last month.

Because Barrett’s appointment, which lasts for the rest of her life, would result in a 6-3 conservative majority on the high court, the activists want to hold off on the hearings until after the start of a new presidential term following the upcoming Nov. 3 election, which they say was Ginsburg’s dying wish.

KPBS - Landlords can begin filing evictions in San Diego housing court Monday for the first time since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Landlords weren’t the only ones at the courthouse — a group of tenants also made the trip to housing court in downtown San Diego, saying a new state law meant to protect them doesn’t go far enough.

“If they kick me out of my house, where I’ve been living for four years, where am I going to go? Am I going to live in this van with my kids, and be more vulnerable to COVID?,” said Patricia Mendoza, a tenant who’s part of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). Mendoza has been fighting for the rights of tenants, including herself, for months now.

In her run for City Council, Fife pushes back on the institutional barriers to Black people that come from a history of oppression.

The Appeal - Carroll Fife, a longtime activist in Oakland, California, is running for City Council on a broad platform promising to address injustice and racial inequities across the city. It’s part of what she describes as a long overdue program of dismantling systems of racial oppression that have lingered in America for decades since the civil rights movement.

“My perspective of the U.S. is this country has never atoned for the original sin of having people enslaved and used as property,” said Fife, executive director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Oakland. “Everything we’re experiencing today is a result of not addressing that.” 

Fife’s platform pushes back on the institutional barriers to Black people that come from a history of oppression. Cat Brooks, a 2018 mayoral candidate and co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, praised Fife as one of the city’s fiercest campaigners and said the City Council campaign is a chance to capitalize on the work done by local activists for years. Fife has the “right platform and the right message” for the current moment, said Brooks, and her policy priorities reflect a realistic response to the challenges faced by Oaklanders and the country as a whole. 

San Jose Mercury News - A bill signed into law this week prevents corporations from scooping up too much of California’s valuable housing stock — a shift that could help shape how the state’s housing market weathers the COVID-fueled economic crisis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed SB 1079 into law this week — one of several housing protection or production-focused bills to make it off his desk. SB 1079, which was inspired by the Oakland activist group Moms 4 Housing, prevents corporations from snapping up bundles of homes during foreclosure auctions. Instead, it gives tenants and families an opportunity to buy them individually.

With the coronavirus pandemic pushing national mortgage default rates higher than they’ve been in years, the new state law could prove especially impactful.

CalMatters - As the pandemic stretches into its seventh month, tenants and landlords have found themselves facing the same question: Who’s going to pay the rent if unemployment continues to hover north of 11%?

After the California Supreme Court’s eviction moratorium expired Sept. 1, Gov. Gavin Newsom and state lawmakers extended protections for residential renters and forestalled evictions until Feb. 1 for people who declared that they lost income due to the coronavirus pandemic. Without a larger national bailout, the state deal is essentially a short-term fix that will convert back rent to civil debt, meaning landlords will still be able to pursue repayment in small claims court.

What this means for renters is that while they get to stay in their homes, the debt keeps piling up. 

KQED - They raised their voices in anger, pain and poetry, speaking words of protest and calling for action in the wake of a Kentucky grand jury’s decision not to charge any Louisville police officers for the death of Breonna Taylor.

One after another, Black women representing Bay Area community organizing groups weighed in Thursday morning during a rally in front of an Oakland mural honoring Taylor at 15th and Broadway.

“Breonna Taylor did not die in a vacuum. She died inside of a paradigm in this country where the lives of Black women and girls do not matter,” said Cat Brooks, one of the event’s organizers and co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project.

The county has partnered with legal aid groups and community-based organizations that will host virtual Know Your Rights workshops about permanent and emergency tenant protections covering evictions and other challenges.

LA Daily News - Los Angeles County launched a program on Monday, Sept. 14, to provide free legal services to tenants facing eviction during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“As many residents face immeasurable uncertainty and grapple with health, mental health and economic hurdles, we want to provide working families with as much stability and peace of mind as possible,” Supervisor Kathryn Barger said. “By equipping at-risk tenants with the resources they need, Los Angeles County can ensure they stay safe, stay strong, and stay housed.”

Earlier this month, the Board of Supervisors extended a moratorium on evictions through Oct. 31, and each member expressed their strong support for the legal aid program. Dubbed “Stay Housed L.A. County,” the countywide initiative includes a website with information about tenant rights, workshops for residents who need legal assistance and other support, including professional legal support.

7 X 7 - On December 26, 2019, Sara Biel and her daughter joined a protest against the eviction of three mothers—Dominique Walker, Misty Cross, and Sameerah Karim—and their children, from a house on Magnolia Street in Oakland.

In November, with the support of Moms4Housing, a collective working toward pragmatic solutions to Oakland's housing crisis, the women had moved into the unlocked house, which had been vacant for two years. Working people who could not afford housing in Oakland, they squatted in a public and intentional manner, seeking to find a way to enter a housing market that has been manipulated by corporate developers.

"That they were being evicted at seven in the morning on the day after Christmas was straight out of the Scrooge playbook," said Biel, who is a psychiatric social worker, poet, and co-editor of Colossus:Home, a new poetry anthology that will raise funds for Moms4Housing.

The American Prospect - Among the states dealing with an expiring eviction moratorium was California. Yesterday, an eviction deal that was announced last Friday secured final passage before the end of the legislative session, and got signed by the governor minutes before the August 31 expiration date. Gavin Newsom called it “a bridge to a more permanent solution,” urging federal support.

Activists are calling it a bridge to nowhere. The moratorium, extended to February 1, 2021, only kicks in for renters who can show hardship due specifically to COVID-19. Tenants must pay at least 25 percent of new rent (not the arrears before September 1) to be eligible. Housing courts will reopen statewide tomorrow, as other types of evictions besides non-payment of rent can move forward.

ABC 7 - State lawmakers and Governor Newsom beat a midnight deadline to extend a bill on eviction moratoriums.

The state's moratorium on evictions expired Wednesday and now new protections are in place for renters that will last thru February 2021

Assembly Bill 3088 bans evictions for tenants who did not pay their rent between March 1 and Aug. 31 because of a financial hardship caused by the pandemic.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact: Anya Svanoe, [email protected], 510-423-2452

Newsom Perpetuates Racist Housing Policy with a Weak Deal that Opens the Door to September Evictions, Despite a Raging Pandemic 

CALIFORNIA - With just a couple days left before the courts reopen, and the “eviction cliff” that threatens to displace roughly 4 million disproportionately Poor, Black and Latinx Californians begins, Governor Newsom’s negotiations produce AB 3088, a weak patchwork deal that will allow many evictions to start September 2nd with others sure to ramp up in the coming months. And, with the exception of existing laws, the deal prevents cities and counties from passing stronger non-payment of rent related eviction protections or moratoriums until Feb 2021. While the governor has issued a statewide stay at home order, the deal will allow Sheriff’s deputies to forcibly evict tenants from their shelter, all while the country reckons with the long history of police violence and racial injustice. Tenant lawyers describe the deal as one that will fail to protect thousands, if not millions, from possible eviction in the months to come. 

The landlords and banks will be fine; not so much the renters. But tenants say it's better than nothing.

48 Hills - Assemblymember David Chiu has reached a compromise with Gov. Gavin Newsom and the big landlord groups on a relatively limited bill to protect renters from evictions during the COVID pandemic.

The measure is nothing like the original bill he had introduced; the governor didn’t even try to salvage that measure and instead has produced a new one, AB 3088, which will go before the Assembly and the Senate Monday before the Legislature adjourns.

It will need a two-thirds majority in both houses to become law.

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez at KQED has a good, detailed report on what the law does and doesn’t do. Put simply, it provides limited protections for tenants, allows landlords an expanded ability to collect back rent, and could lead to vast numbers of evictions this fall.

The group said in San Diego, at least 20,000 renters are at risk of eviction by Sept. 1.

Renters without jobs said they are definitely feeling the pain and uncertainty as they fear the first of the month, saying they don't know if they'll even have a place to live. A couple dozen people rallied Thursday at the Hall of Justice, calling upon Governor Newsom to step in and extend the eviction moratorium.

Governor Newsom:

On behalf of ACCE Action and our 16,000 dues-paying families across the state, we want to make sure you know where we stand on the developing proposal to address the looming eviction tsunami.

The members of ACCE, and the communities we work in and on behalf of, are low-income and predominantly African-American and Latinx. These communities — our communities — were facing some of the harshest impacts of the housing crisis prior to the pandemic, with massive push-out of long-time residents and growing homelessness.

Labor Notes - California’s November ballot will feature a challenge to the notorious Proposition 13, which in 1978 helped to inaugurate the decades-long neoliberal assault on labor.

Prop 13’s anti-tax, small government campaign, with a dog-whistle racist subtext, created a national template for conservatives to simultaneously attack public sector unions, public employees, and the people they served. For the right wing, this was the lab experiment for Austerity 101.

In a time of high inflation, Prop 13 exploited fear—older homeowners on fixed incomes were afraid that rising taxes would drive them out of their homes. It rolled back assessments to 1975 rates, set property taxes at 1 percent of value, and capped increases at 2 percent per year, no matter the inflation rate or the increase in market price of the property. When it passed, grandma breathed more easily.

But grandma was not the biggest beneficiary of Prop 13. The same rules applied to commercial property—including giant corporate-owned properties like Chevron and Disney. The consequent plunge in property tax revenues to local and state government forced enormous cuts to social programs and schools, led to layoffs of public employees, and established a new normal in the Golden State, described by former California Federation of Teachers president Raoul Teilhet as “poor services for poor people.”

Demonstrators say mass evictions are coming if government doesn't act.

LA Daily News - About 100 renters and housing activists blocked the entrances to the Superior Courthouse in downtown Los Angeles Friday morning, Aug. 21, to demonstrate against what they say will be a coming tsunami of mass evictions if Gov. Gavin Newsom and the California legislature do not act.

Activists stood in lines in front of three entrances to the Hill Street courthouse beginning around 7 a.m. Security guards watched on from inside the building, but did not confront the group even as people began lining up at the front doors for court appearances.

CBS 2 - Dozens of people turned out for a protest in downtown Los Angeles Friday morning demanding that local and state officials extend a moratorium on evictions for struggling renters because of the ongoing economic crisis brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.

The protesters gathered outside the L.A. County Superior Court building and also staged a car caravan.

It was in response to a vote from the Judicial Council of California on Aug. 13 to lift the moratorium on evictions and foreclosures beginning Sept. 1.

La Opinión - Ya en el quinto mes de la pandemia del COVID-19, muchas personas han aceptado que no saben qué pasará con su futuro ya que no tienen dinero para pagar su renta.

Para aliviar este problema en algunas familias, la junta directiva del condado de Los Ángeles ha dirigido 100 millones de dólares de la Ley de Ayuda, Alivio y Seguridad Económica para el Coronavirus (CARES) para crear el programa LA County COVID-19 Rent Relief.

Desde ayer y hasta el 31 de agosto, familias de las áreas no incorporadas de Los Ángeles podrán llenar una solicitud en línea para entrar a una lotería donde se ayudará de 8,000 a más de 9,000 hogares a pagar su renta.

Housing advocates urge Newsom, lawmakers to help

Orange County Register - The Judicial Council of California on Tuesday announced it likely will end a statewide eviction moratorium on Sept. 1, aiding landlords seeking back rent but drawing dire warnings from community advocates about widespread evictions and homelessness.

Housing experts are warning that millions of California tenants could lose their homes unless Gov. Gavin Newsom issues an executive order delaying evictions and state lawmakers quickly enact more protections for renters financially struggling through the coronavirus pandemic. The judicial council’s proposal would give the governor and lawmakers two more weeks to craft a solution. A vote on the moratorium was expected this month.

Advocates say evictions will hit quickly and hardest in Black and Latinx communities. About three-quarters of renter households in California experiencing pandemic-related job losses included at least one person of color, according to a recent study by the UC Berkeley Terner Center for Housing Innovation. Many are cash-strapped despite performing essential jobs in retail, food services, construction and health care.

Alternet - During her 2020 presidential primary campaign, Sen. Elizabeth Warren had a lot to say about the United States’ housing crisis — and after suspending her campaign and endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden (now the presumptive Democratic nominee), the Massachusetts senator continued to address the subject. Warren, in an op-ed she wrote for the Washington Post with Carroll Fife (director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment), stresses that the coronavirus pandemic has made a brutal housing crisis even worse. And private equity firms, according to Warren and Fife, are hoping to cash in on the misery by gobbling up “distressed real estate.”

KQED - Ryan Furtkamp and Brianne Hodson are counting down the days until local eviction moratoriums end, fearing what comes next.

Furtkamp, 32, and Hodson, 35, are married and live in Oakland, just north of downtown, and say they moved to the city for its diversity and progressive politics.

Furtkamp, who hails from Phoenix, works at UC Berkeley in communications. Hodson, who moved up from Los Angeles after high school, built her own successful dog-walking business.

Their combined incomes paid their $2,275 monthly rent — until the pandemic wiped out Hodson’s business. As clients dropped off, her income fell.

Hodson has gotten benefits from the federal Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program, but not enough to help them make rent, which they haven’t paid since April. The couple and other tenants in their 39-unit building say they plan to try to negotiate rent forgiveness with their landlord, San Francisco-based Mosser Companies. They say the only thing keeping them housed now is Oakland’s eviction moratorium.

Opinion by Elizabeth Warren and Carroll Fife

Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, represents Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. Carroll Fife is the director of the Oakland office of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

The Washington Post - The nation is facing an accelerating housing crisis. Too many people had no stable housing before the pandemic hit, and covid-19 has made the problem even worse. Renters who were already facing an affordable housing shortage (with many spending more than half of their income on rent) now have no federal rental assistance or federal protection from eviction. Homeowners have less than a month left of foreclosure protection. And more than 30 million people receiving unemployment insurance just saw their benefits cut by $600 a week, raising the threat of a wave of defaults that could trigger a double-dip recession.

A coalition of advocacy groups and unions urged passage of Prop 15 in November.

LA Daily News - Parents, students and teachers rolled a car caravan to the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce that filtered into a school district office in downtown L.A. Monday, Aug. 3 to urge a safe and equitable reopening of L.A. public schools and passage of Proposition 15.

The demonstration arrived at the L.A. Area Chamber of Commerce around 10 a.m. where activists held a press conference. Following that a small group walked to a nearby office for the Los Angeles Unified School District. There students and other individuals entered the lobby where they were confronted by security guards as car horns blared outside on the street.

KVTU FOX2 - Many eviction moratoriums across the Bay Area have been extended, some indefinitely, and many others through the end of September. But tenant protections will vary depending on where you live.

In all Bay Area counties, renters have strong protections relative to the rest of the country. Certain cities, such as Oakland, where no one can ever be evicted due to nonpayment of rent during the pandemic, have their own rules, and the strongest protection prevails. 

The amount of time tenants will have to pay their rent varies from 90 days in Marin County to one year in Alameda County.

“When the courts open is when we're going to see all of this play out—the difference between living in Alameda County and living in San Mateo or Contra Costa,” said Leah Simon-Weisberg, the legal director for anti-displacement and land use programs at the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. “So, whether you live in Albany or El Cerrito is going to make a huge difference.”

Proposition 21 Reaches Campaign Milestone with 3,421 Individual Donations, While Committees Representing Billionaire developers, investors funding the opposition raised millions from 141 contributors

BusinessWire - Housing justice advocates and champions of Proposition 21, a November 2020 state ballot initiative that will limit unfair rents, keeping families in their homes and preventing homelessness, are pleased to announce they have reached a significant campaign milestone: 3,421 individual campaign donations, with an average contribution of $12.76, have been made in support of the initiative. Meanwhile, four committees supported by the most powerful players in Big Real Estate, including the California Apartment Association, the California Rental Housing Association, Essex Property Trust, AvalonBay Communities, and Equity Residential, have raised millions with a combined 141 contributions.https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20200731005500/en/

The Chronicle of Philanthropy - As our nation grapples with a confluence of crises, philanthropy is abuzz with how best to respond. Some are increasing payouts. Others are allowing grantees more flexibility in how they spend funds. A few have issued bonds to increase their charitable giving without tapping endowments. These are all useful steps, but none do enough to uproot historical inequities and upend power structures in society and philanthropy.

We offer an alternative solution: We encourage foundations to join the growing movement to distribute all their philanthropic assets within the next few years.

As the leaders of three foundations doing just that, we feel compelled in this moment to encourage grant makers to redistribute private philanthropic wealth back into communities instead of holding on to funds so their institutions can exist indefinitely. If we are to live our values, we must ask ourselves and our peers, “What are we saving our endowments for?”

LA Daily News - Alicia Kneifl had just started a new life in a new city with a new job. She and her husband sold their house in Lancaster, put their goods and their boat in storage, and rented an 11th-story Long Beach apartment with city and ocean views.

Then the coronavirus shutdowns came, and the Kneifls rapidly lost everything — first their jobs, then their savings. They paid less than half their rent through June and couldn’t pay any in July.

Adding to their hardship, Kneifl’s unemployment check will drop to $198 next week unless Congress extends the $600 weekly unemployment supplement approved under the CARES Act.

“You can’t really survive on that. That’s nothing,” Kneifl said during a phone interview, starting to sob. “All day long, I’m researching. Mornings, I’m applying for jobs, afternoons I’m trying to find resources, like food stamps. … It’s definitely a scary situation.”

KRON - The push to defund local law enforcement agencies continued in Danville on Thursday. Activists held a car caravan protest outside the home of a Contra Costa County supervisor. The group is calling on the county to shrink the sheriff’s budget and redirect those funds to community causes. A caravan of cars making two passes by Contra Costa County Supervisor Candace Andersen’s home in Danville.​

Reuters - Last month, as the coronavirus was surging in Houston, recently unemployed hospital secretary Ramzan Boudoin got more bad news: She had six days to vacate her apartment for failing to pay the rent.

A Texas ban on evictions had enabled Boudoin to keep the two-bedroom place she shared with her daughter and granddaughter while she searched for another job. But that moratorium expired on May 18. The landlord took legal action and Boudoin couldn’t come up with $2,997 plus interest to settle the judgment.

FOX 2 KTVU - The Oakland City Council voted Tuesday to extend the city’s eviction moratorium until the state of emergency expires, which means that renters cannot be evicted in most cases, including COVID-related nonpayment, but will have to pay the owed rent when the state of emergency is over. These protections, which have an indefinite expiration date, coexist alongside Alameda County’s eviction moratorium, which provides similar protections until the end of September. 

The amount of time renters have to pay back their owed rent is not specified in the Oakland moratorium, but the county ordinance allows people 12 months to pay the rent back without being evicted, during which time the owed funds will become a consumer debt. Both ordinances prevent tenants from being removed from their homes due to this debt, and from having an eviction judgement against them, which could impact long term housing security.

Los dueños de viviendas no podrán desalojar a las familias hasta finales de septiembre.

Telemundo52 - La Junta de Supervisores del condado de Los Ángeles aprobó el martes continuar con la protección contra el desalojo de inquilinos hasta el 30 de septiembre. 

La orden de emergencia estaba por expirar a finales de julio. Pero la medida aprobada, de acuerdo con algunos de sus miembros, busca evitar un mayor aumento de las personas sin hogar en el condado. 

A Bay Area rent strike could be a harbinger of tenant unrest as California prepares for an eviction tsunami triggered by the pandemic.

Capital & Main - Tenants and supporters demonstrated at an Oakland apartment complex where tenants are mounting a rent strike against Mosser Capital. During the COVID-19 crisis the landlord is insisting on bringing investors to inspect the apartments despite the danger of contagion.

Mosser bought more than 20 buildings in Oakland in 2016, according to the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE), which organized the rent strike. Mosser received a Paycheck Protection Program loan between $2 million and $5 million during the pandemic.

Hertzberg co-authored his own bill aimed at providing rent relief, but activists say another piece of legislation, AB 1436, is stronger.

Los Angeles Daily News - Activists seeking relief for struggling renters brought their demands to the Van Nuys home of Senate Majority Leader Bob Hertzberg on Friday, July 17, urging him to support legislation that would bar landlords from evicting tenants as they pay back rent they were unable to make during the COVID-19 emergency.

KGTV ABC 10 - A pair of protests collided in front of State Sen. Toni Atkins' downtown San Diego office Friday morning, and joined forces to call for help.

Members from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment gathered to tell Atkins to support Assembly Bill 1436, which would extend the eviction moratorium until April 1, 2021. They say it's the only way to protect people who haven't been able to pay rent because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Loud rally keeps investors from entering units during the COVID crisis.

48 Hills - It was a musical morning on Thursday at 444 28th Street in West Oakland where tenants, community organizers from the ACCE Institute and the Black Housing Union, and the Brass Liberation Orchestra, a band which performs at protests and rallies, held a rally in front of the apartment building.

The building’s landlord since 2018, Mosser Capital, has sent multiple notices saying that investors would be coming to inspect the 34 apartments, and tenants sought to prevent potential speculators from entering the apartments, which they say is a hazardous practice during the COVID-19 pandemic.

San Diego Community Newspaper Group - Protesters rode in a caravan around La Jolla on July 1 to drive their point home by picketing the houses of the wealthy as part of a statewide effort to promote greater social equity.

The Sacramento Bee - A group of workers and activists rode in a caravan of vehicles Wednesday afternoon to the lavish home of a wealthy Sacramento real estate developer as part of statewide protest demanding California’s millionaires and billionaires to invest in underrepresented communities hit the hardest by coronavirus pandemic.

About 60 people in about 30 vehicles started their caravan at the planned site of a University of California, Davis development project near Sacramento’s Oak Park neighborhood, before the demonstration headed to the home of Angelo Tsakopoulos, the founder of AKT Development.

The Hub - LOS ANGELES (CNS) – Community rights organizations are seeking to join a federal lawsuit to defend the city of Los Angeles’ COVID-19 emergency eviction protections and rent freeze, it was announced today.

Attorneys for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Action and Strategic Actions for a Just Economy filed a motion to intervene Wednesday in the legal action lodged last month by the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles. The Southland’s largest landlord organization wants to void protections from evictions enacted by the city during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Sacramento Bee - As part of a statewide event, protesters from the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment called for the wealthy to pay for the recovery from the coronavirus. They caravanned from Oak Park to the home of developer Angelo K. Tsakopoulos.

Similar protests targeted wealthy Californians in other cities

San Diego Union Tribune - A caravan of about 60 cars drove through upscale San Diego neighborhoods and passed some of the city’s most affluent residents Wednesday as part of a statewide protest aimed at raising awareness of wealth disparity and inequality.

Organized by renters, workers and labor leaders, the local protest had planned to target UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla, developer Douglas Manchester and MC Properties owner Michael Contreras. The protest was one of several throughout California on Wednesday, chosen because the first of the month traditionally is a day when rent is due.

“We’re visiting some of the richest people in San Diego to talk about how during this pandemic many of us are struggling to make ends meet and have a roof over our heads while these super wealthy people have made money off the backs of our community workers and renters,” said Jose Lopez, a local organizer with Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment.

Substandard housing risks grow with coronavirus pandemic

San Jose Mercury News - The Oakland City Attorney has sued three landlords for allegedly harassing and trying to illegally evict tenants, escalating concerns that renters still face dislocation and dangerous conditions despite enhanced protections during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The suit claims the landlords of three Oakland rentals harassed tenants and forced them to live in unsafe and squalid apartments for at least two years and continuing during the pandemic.

“This case presents some of the most extreme harassment and exploitation we’ve encountered in our tenant protection actions,” Oakland City Attorney Barbara J. Parker said in a statement. “We will not tolerate this flagrant abuse in Oakland.”

KQED - The Castillo-Gutierréz family came to Oakland five years ago, by way of Los Angeles, for the reason many people move anywhere: Work.

Anastacio Castillo, 47, the patriarch of the family, started out selling tamales and corn not in a shop, not at a stand, but by hand, person to person, hitting the streets eager to earn for his wife and three children. Eventually, he found a job as a handyman.

The Castillo-Gutierréz’s earn their living and reside in a single-family home in Oakland. But Anastacio lost work just before the pandemic shelter-in-place orders hit, making it doubly hard to recover.

The family fell behind on their rent, and now their landlord is trying to evict them, despite an Oakland eviction moratorium barring exactly that.

Advocates brace for a new wave of homelessness.

The Progressive - Patricia Mendoza lives in Imperial Beach, a four-and-a-half-square-mile city of about 29,000 people at the southwest edge of California. She is a single mother with two children, ages sixteen and nine, and until recently she was employed as a non-emergency medical transport driver earning about $2,000 a month.

She lost her job at the end of March, when California Governor Gavin Newsom imposed a stay-at-home order to combat the spread of the novel coronavirus. Mendoza had little savings—rent took up about 70 percent of her monthly income, with the rest going for food and utilities. So when she lost her job, she had to stop paying rent.

“The last two weeks in March, I only worked four days,” she said in a phone interview. “I didn’t have money to pay rent, and I had to feed my kids and pay the bills.”

Without rent relief for California tenants, housing advocates fear the pandemic will worsen the homelessness crisis

Salon - Amid the pandemic, many cities and counties adopted eviction moratoriums as a stopgap to prevent evictions and therefore homelessness. Yet as both everyday Americans and politicians grow weary of lockdowns, many public health experts and activists fear what will happen when these ordinances lift.

The end of the eviction moratorium is particularly grim in cities like Oakland, California, where economic inequalities were already severe before the pandemic. In 2018, a United Nations report described Oakland's homelessness crisis as "cruel and inhumane."

For Immediate Release: June 10th, 2020

Media Contact: Anya Svanoe, (510) 423-2452

CALIFORNIA – Today, Assemblymember Chiu introduced AB1436 the “The COVID-19 Eviction Protection and Housing Stability Act.” The bill protects California renters from police-enforced evictions due to unpaid rent during the pandemic, protects tenants from late fees or lost security deposits for unpaid rent and extends the date for repayment by 15 months. The legislation is being moved amidst a growing call for multi-pronged solutions to racial violence in California under the umbrella of a Black New Deal. Tenants on rent strike across California celebrate the bill as a first step in the #CancelRent movement in protecting Californians from the looming mass wave of evictions and escalating homelessness if the bill is not passed. To date, the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) has collected 60,000 pledges to rent strike from Californians across the state calling on state legislators to cancel rent and mortgage payments. 

Measure would ban evictions for back rent owed due to pandemic

San Jose Mercury News - Lawmakers on Wednesday introduced a measure for long-term eviction relief for renters struggling through the coronavirus pandemic, as a state judicial council delayed a decision on dropping a temporary ban on renter-landlord court hearings.

Bay Area lawmakers proposed a statewide ban on evictions for back rent owed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The measure would give stressed renters up to 15 months after the health emergency has lifted to pay back debts, while allowing landlords to pursue civil claims to recoup lost rent. The measure, AB 1436, also encourages tenants and landlords to reach private agreements to settle accounts.

Assemblymember David Chiu, D-San Francisco, said the pandemic has put millions of California renters at risk for eviction. Increasing homelessness and stacking families into tighter quarters would compound health risks, he said. Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, and Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, also endorsed the measure.

KQED - Walter Riley, 76, hadn’t left the house in more than two months. But it was a special day.

His grandson, Akil Riley, 19, had organized a demonstration to protest police violence against black and brown people, part of the nationwide movement following the killing of George Floyd in Minnesota.

Thousands of people gathered in front of Oakland Technical High School, with crowds spilling out into the street and extending for several city blocks.

“I hadn’t seen numbers like that since the Civil Rights Movement,” said the elder Riley, an Oakland attorney and activist who had organized similar demonstrations in the South a half a century ago. “I was impressed that so many young black people came out for this. It was a moving and powerful moment for me.”

Carroll Fife, TurHa Ak, John Jones III and Refa One on how this moment compares to movements of the past, and what comes next.

Berkelyside - For seven straight days, Oaklanders have taken to the streets to demonstrate against police brutality toward Black Americans. In some ways, these events feel wholly unprecedented. In other ways, this moment is reminiscent of previous chapters in the Bay Area’s deep history of political protest and social-justice movement building.

Oaklandside contributors Jeannine Etter and Sarah Belle Lin interviewed four seasoned Black activists with deep organizing experience in Oakland. They reflected on the past week’s demonstrations, and offered advice to younger activists and anyone interested in better understanding this moment.

The Oakland Post - Across the entire county, Black Americans have been crying out for specific data on the impacts of the coronavirus on their communities due to high rates of contraction and mortality.

In Oakland, coalition of Black-led organizations was convened to address the disproportionate impacts of COVID-19 and its evisceration of the Black community.

The resulting effort is The Black New Deal, a platform of short, mid and long-range goals crafted to address the immediate needs of Oakland’s Black residents.

22 local organizations want rent relief, free broadband, money for undocumented residents, small business help

San Diego Union-Tribune - A coalition of nonprofit groups and labor unions is lobbying San Diego to make major revisions to the city’s proposed budget that would help renters, low-income workers, undocumented residents and small businesses.

The Community Budget Alliance, a partnership that includes 22 local organizations, wants the city to give rent relief to people struggling during the pandemic and provide free high-speed internet to low-income households.

The alliance also wants more money devoted to enforcing worker rights and wage rules, boosting small businesses in low-income areas and translating city communications into the many languages spoken across San Diego.

Reuters - WASHINGTON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Activist Winsome Pendergrass has an explanation for why the coronavirus is disproportionately affecting African Americans and fuelling the anger that has exploded onto U.S. streets - housing.

“The ones who feel it most are the black and brown people. That’s why COVID runs so prevalent in our area - you have eight people in a one-bedroom apartment,” said Pendergrass, a leader with the activist group New York Communities for Change.

“COVID has blown the lid off to show that we’re all living one paycheck away from the side of the street,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.

Pendergrass is among a number of activists and residents warning that the protests over race and policing that have roiled the United States for more than a week are driven in part by housing inequalities exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic.

Marketplace - Vanessa Bulnes and her husband Richard were homeowners in Oakland for nearly 20 years until they lost their home to foreclosure after the Great Recession and were forced to move into a rental. Now they put about 70% of their take-home pay toward rent each month — money that’s no longer building equity in a home. 

When COVID-19 hit, putting millions of Americans out of work, the rent was no longer affordable for Bulnes and many like her — even on unemployment benefits. So she went on a rent strike.

“If nothing is done that’s a permanent solution, like rent forgiveness or cancelation, I can’t even describe what the world is going to look like,” Bulnes said. “It’s a scary thought.”

Truthout - Permutations of disaster are bearing down with such velocity on working-class people in the United States, it’s not easy to keep abreast — of the harms, but also of the welcome initiatives.

Jump-started by Cooperation Jackson co-founder and co-director Kali Akuno, a People’s Strike was announced on April 1 to inspire working-class people to think deeply about their futures and come to a shared commitment that concessions from power must be demanded, are worth struggling for and that steps must be taken to prepare materially for that struggle.

From now until further notice, on the first day of every month, the People’s Strike will birth a program of coordinated actions from coast to coast.

FOX 40 - When the pandemic began, millions across the state were suddenly unsure of how they would pay their rents and mortgages.

“Right now, we’re having folks having to choose between paying for food and paying for rent,” said César Aguirre with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment Sacramento.

That’s why community groups like ACCE fought for moratoriums on evictions in cities across the state.

San Diego Union-Tribune - About 30 anti-eviction protesters gathered Tuesday evening in San Diego’s Mission Hills neighborhood, near where San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore lives, and traced outlines of dead bodies with blue, pink, yellow and white chalk.

“Evictions equal death,” they wrote in chalk and on hand-painted signs.

On May 7, the Sheriff’s Department announced plans to resume roughly 160 evictions that were ordered before the coronavirus pandemic. Later that day, sheriff’s officials reversed the decision, saying they would hold off on the evictions even though they were “perfectly legal.”

San Francisco Chronicle - On May 6, Lorenzo Perez got a notice on the door of the Walnut Creek apartment he shares with his wife, Lesly Ordonez, and their two children. It said they had three days to pay rent or quit.

In other words, the landlord was threatening to evict the family.

LA Times - Protesters took to the lawn outside of the Irvine Co. office building in Newport Beach on Friday to express their concerns about economic struggles they face regarding affordable housing.

The novel coronavirus pandemic has resulted in a loss of wages for many people not deemed to be part of the essential workforce.

A group called the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment organized a caravan of about 15 cars that made several trips around the building, honking horns and displaying signs that focused on two messages in particular “Cancel Rent” and “Make Them Pay.”

KQED - California’s housing crisis is driving state lawmakers to think big. One question they’re considering: How can the Golden State guarantee housing as a right? This week, state legislators looked at two different approaches that tackle the legal right to housing and how the coronavirus pandemic is shaping the debate.

LA Times - Los Angeles County has ended its controversial PACE home improvement loan program, a decision that follows years of criticism that the county enabled predatory lending and put people at risk of losing their homes.

County officials — who launched the PACE program in 2015 to fund energy- and water-efficient home improvements — said they made the decision after determining the program lacked adequate consumer protections.

Homeowners repeatedly alleged the private home improvement contractors who signed them up for PACE misrepresented how the financing would work, saddling them with loans they could not understand or afford.

Black Enterprise - Oakland-based organizer and Regional Director of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment for San Francisco and Oakland, Carroll Fife, has dedicated her life’s work to advocating for the rights of marginalized people. During these unprecedented times, Fife sat down with BLACK ENTERPRISE to share the importance of her work on the front lines, with Moms 4 Housing, and administratively as she helps black people remain politically engaged and empowered.

Over the span of her career, Fife has been able to make incredible strides toward the liberation of oppressed people. Fife is a selfless organizer who understands that educating others as you uplift them is what ignites lasting change. That, coupled with the power of storytelling, is how she and the women she organizes with has attributed to their success.

This Oakland-based group is reclaiming vacant homes from speculators and profiteers so that no one ends up on the streets.

Shondaland - Last November, Dominique Walker had a radical plan: Occupy a vacant house in her hometown to protest the fact that there are far more empty houses in Oakland, California than those in need of a home. Though she had the support of the community, Wedgewood Inc., a house-flipping company that owned the home, sued to have them thrown out.

“I've never seen an eviction done in that manner. There were [Roomba-like] robots that came into the house, like we were terrorists. They sent the robot in first, and then they came in. They had AR-15s and military fatigues, and tanks for mothers and babies,” Walker says, recalling the Tuesday morning this past January when the incident happened.

The city’s emergency measures will only delay a huge wave of evictions until later this year.

The Nation - California is often painted by liberal media as the “State of Resistance,” where rationality prevails and the response to Covid-19 has been guided by science. And Los Angeles might appear to be this progressive bastion’s crown jewel: In recent years, media outlets have praised LA’s mayor, rising Democratic star Eric Garcetti, for leading what one Economist story proposed as “the model for a more diverse America.” The mayor’s nightly Covid-19 briefings, streamed on Facebook, “come from a place of love,” one law professor recently told the Los Angeles Times. “He’s tried to come from a place of kindness. He’s trying to build consensus.”

This boosterism obscures the racialized poverty, suffering, and violence that coexist uneasily with astonishing wealth in this paradise of liberal capitalism. LA has never been a friendly place for tenants, but the situation has worsened in recent decades, as wages stagnated and rents soared. Now LA is staring down the barrel of what could be the largest wave of forced evictions in the region’s history, and local leaders—including Garcetti—are refusing to do what’s necessary to secure housing for renters and unhoused Angelenos.

Rather than being a model city, Los Angeles has become a cautionary tale: Even under the best conditions that liberalism and the Democratic Party have to offer, those who don’t own property will be exploited by those who do.

The New Yorker - It is now clear that the twin prescriptions of social isolation and shuttering large parts of the national economy have lowered the death toll of the novel coronavirus in the United States from the direst predictions. But in a country where the “social safety net” is more a distant memory than a source of actual provision or support, large swaths of the public now face the threat of hunger and homelessness. Each passing week brings more questions about what our cities and states will look like when the shelter-in-place orders are lifted; they also bring us one week closer to the rent coming due.

By May 6th, twenty per cent of tenants had not paid this month’s rent, a slight improvement over the twenty-two per cent who did not pay last month’s rent in the first week. This is probably the result of renters receiving increased unemployment and stimulus checks, but it is also unsustainable. Republicans have vowed not to renew the extra unemployment money when it comes up for a vote again in July, and most states are running out of funding to make their shares of the payments. Meanwhile, in a matter of weeks, a staggering thirty-three million people have filed for unemployment, and the future of millions more hangs in the balance. April’s unemployment rate was nearly fifteen per cent, a height of joblessness not reached since the Great Depression. The Congressional Budget Office has projected that by the fall, the official unemployment rate could rise even higher, to sixteen per cent.

VOGUE - In Oakland, the Bay Area’s deep-rooted housing crisis is starkly visible. In makeshift encampments, the city's homeless live in tents, old cars, and mobile homes clustered together in parking lots. Vacant houses, all chipped paint and rotting wood, stand feet away from newly renovated properties that tech industry transplants would swoop up in a heartbeat.

At the end of last year, Moms 4 Housing, a group of Oakland-born unhoused and marginally housed community activists, began a campaign to face these issues head-on. They planned an occupation of one home that had been sitting vacant for years, setting their sights on fighting gentrification, institutional poverty, and a speculative housing market that’s completely transformed the city that they grew up in. It garnered attention worldwide, and now, in the wake of COVID-19, their actions have taken on a whole new context. How can California’s homeless population heed the call to shelter in place when there’s no such shelter to speak of?

LA Times - With the state's economy in pandemic-induced freefall, missed rent payments are piling up for California tenants and landlords. On this episode of Gimme Shelter, Matt and Liam discuss whether a rent strike will provoke the state into action, and what can the government realistically do to help? First, the Avocado of the Fortnite takes us to Liam's backyard (4:00). Then a discussion of the #CancelTheRent movement and two state proposals to address the issue (7:00). Then an interview with Patricia Mendoza, a renter in Imperial Beach who participated in the May 1 rent strike (30:00). Finally, an interview with Evelyn Garcia, whose family owns an apartment complex in South L.A. (44:00).

LA Times - Chris Tyler lost his job at a restaurant on March 15 — the same day Mayor Eric Garcetti banned sit-down food service to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus in Los Angeles. A couple of weeks later, he and his partner decided not to pay rent for the one-bedroom apartment they share in Silver Lake.

“It’s a decision that I have made personally that is both political and very much out of necessity,” said Tyler, 31. “I don’t think it’s an unreasonable choice to make in the middle of a global pandemic.”

As California enters its second full month under stay-at-home orders designed to prevent more coronavirus cases, a growing number of tenants are turning their personal economic situations into mass protests, demanding that legislators at all levels of government pass laws to cancel rent until the public health crisis is over.

They call it a “rent strike” and it is just one tactic marking a dramatic new escalation in the long-running fight over affordable housing in California.

CalMatters - By Patricia Mendoza, Special to CalMatters

It was a few weeks into the coronavirus pandemic when I got the call from my boss. I could tell from the sound of her voice what I was about to hear: She had no choice but to let me go.

Just like that, I’d lost my job — a job I loved, that I did well, and that I needed to feed my two kids and pay my rent.

My boss apologized and promised I could return “when things got back to normal.” But when will things get back to normal? And what will happen to my family in the meantime?

My heart sank as I wondered how we were going to stay in our home. The answer is that we won’t be able to, unless our elected leaders cancel and forgive my rent until this coronavirus crisis is over.

Newsweek - The debate on whether people should still be made to pay rent after they have been forced from their jobs will be highlighted again as tens of thousands of tenants across the U.S. are expected to take part in a mass strike in order to help ease the financial burden brought on as a result of the coronavirus.

A coordinated day of action had been planned by groups across the country urging people who have lost their jobs as a result of the virus and lockdown procedures to withhold paying their rent on Friday, May 1.

Marketwatch - For the last two months, Mark Osgood from Chicago said he has not been able to pay rent. He’s 32, an Uber driver, and says work has dried up due to the virus. He said neither his stimulus nor his unemployment checks have come in yet.

“I mean, I live paycheck to paycheck as it is,” he said. “And if there is no income coming in, there’s no bill money going out.”

Today is May 1, rent is due, and he said he won’t be paying. Neither will many others — there are rent strikes across the country today, as a response to job losses and economic damage from the pandemic. Worker rights activists across the country are also calling for a day of action to bring attention to workplace issues around COVID-19.

kpbs - A caravan of protesters wound through San Diego on Friday, part of a statewide rent strike.

More than a month into the coronavirus lockdown and resulting local economic collapse, many tenants are stuck between having to choose between paying rent or paying for other necessities.

Some tenant advocates say the government hasn’t done enough to support renters.

"The government is more concerned on this economic crisis than the people that make this economy work, which are workers. We’re exchanging this pandemic for a mass eviction crisis," said Grace Martinez, an organizer with the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment. Her group helped organize the caravan and strike Friday.

The TODAY Show - The economic toll continues to mount with 30 million Americans now out of work during the pandemic, and many others are saying they’ve been unable to file their jobless claims, @jolingkent reports.

CBS News Moneywatch - Thousands of people around the U.S. are calling for politicians to cancel rent and mortgages, with temporary legal restrictions on evictions set to expire in many states in a matter of weeks.

"Can't pay in May? Don't pay May," was the message sent out by an Oakland, California, tenants' group on 50,000 postcards. In New York state, 15,000 residents in apartments and other housing have pledged to not pay their rent on May 1, according to organizers of the protest. In Los Angeles, strikers are rallying near City Hall to demand that local officials suspend rent, mortgage and utility payments. 

"I've been practicing law for over 40 years and I've never seen something like this," said Andrew Scherer, a housing lawyer and the former head of Legal Services NYC, a non-profit group that offers legal aid to low-income people. "This is a very unusual occurrence — having a fairly large group of people saying, 'Something's got to give here.'" 

KPFA - KPFA News: Now a look at organizing. Housing rights advocates are trying to build momentum behind a demand they call “cancel rent”–a call to go further than the limited eviction pause ordered by Governor Gavin Newsom under the state of emergency. KPFA’s Scott Baba reports.